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IT Innovation at the USPTO
in 2016
Guest blog by Chief
Information Officer John Owens II
As the year comes to a
close, it is a perfect time to reflect on our current successes, and challenge
ourselves to continually improve our information technology (IT) systems. As
the Chief Information Officer, I am focused on driving innovation at the USPTO
while protecting our nation’s cutting edge ideas.
The Office of the Chief
Information Officer (OCIO) works hard every day to make sure both our existing
systems and our new “next generation” systems enable examiners to accomplish
their important work. We are building excellent tools for the public while we
drive to fine-tune our own processes for greater efficiency. Supported by more
robust, updated IT systems and tools, USPTO examiners will be able to leverage
these tools, and new data, to issue the best quality patents and trademarks.
When we improve systems and services for our examiners, the public benefits as
well.
Bringing you next generation
technology
Since day one, I have been
committed to getting rid of legacy systems and bringing next generation
technology to USPTO employees. This year, we got even closer to that goal. For patent examiners, we’ve been testing a new Examiner Search tool that
will replace the existing EAST and WEST systems. Currently, 200 examiners are using it and
it’s expected to be rolled out to all examiners in December 2016. The Patent
Trial and Appeal Board’s End to End (PTAB E2E) system was deployed in July, supplementing
the existing PRPS system, and has received tremendous positive feedback. In
Trademarks, Law Office 122 is using Trademark Next Generation (TMNG) which we will
roll out to the remaining Law Offices through fiscal year 2017. TMNG will
replace all legacy systems with one, cohesive, web application.
DevOps has a firm hold
Our journey towards DevOps
is well on its way as we have partnered with the Office of the Chief Financial
Officer to cement it in our culture through the continuous development of Fee
Processing Next Generation. We’re piloting
weekly deployments of bug fixes with great success. The lessons learned will
cascade throughout all products. We are
also using blue green deployments on three products to decrease any outages to
our customers during their maintenance.
As DevOps is very much a community culture, we also hosted DevOpsDays DC in June, which
sold out in the first day. We look
forward to even more DevOps events in the future.
Embracing open source and
open data
Open data is a call to
action -- which is why we created the USPTO’s Open Data Portal. We’ve been working hard to make
our centuries worth of data into a form the public can easily access and
manipulate. We continue to add to and
improve our GitHub library, and some of our current
projects include design patterns, a tool to help parse patent data, and a
trademark status app.
Your customer experience
We constantly engage with
our internal and external customers. You
are a critical partner in our success, and we’ve been working hard to make our
systems as user friendly as possible. To
that end, we’re moving towards an enterprise single sign-on (SSO) with role-based
accounts. Which means, eventually you
will not need to log in separately to every system you use, but instead just
log in once, and we do the rest. The SSO
system will recognize what systems you are authorized to use and will give you
access.
Finally, in order to assist
the intellectual property community, this year we opened two new Patent and
Trademark Resource Centers, in Las Cruces, NM, and San Jose, CA.
What to look for in 2017
In 2017, we will continue to
expand the role-based accounts to more systems that will dramatically improve customers’
USPTO logged in experience. Starting in
the spring, we will be upgrading to Windows 10.
Late in 2017, you will be seeing improvements to how to search and file
for both patents and trademarks.
I look forward to sharing
more updates with you in the future as we continue to use the latest technology
to support the USPTO and the public.
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